Week three of the ToL course and the focus is on the trunk.
Stephan explained how going into the trunk can be seen as a voyage back in time and in the light of that our exercise this week was to do the Deep Time Walk. I used the app and listened to the conversation that runs through the 4,600 million years of the earth's history while walking 4.6km.
It leads to that cool understanding of how incredibly recent we humans are. Gosh, mammals are recent. Multi cellular life!
After that I sat with the Ancient Oak. He seemed appropriate.
As well as being quite old, he does after all have an impressive trunk.
I laid out my mandala and sat.
Just after recording this, I was visited by a passing gathering of long-tailed tits. I didn't want to move much in case I scared them so the video is rubbish.
So what did I think?
Two things. One about the 7 processes and how the trunk is involved.
Using energy, the tree extracts minerals from the soil.
The minerals are dissolved in water and flow up the xylem.
They are separated as they feed the buds.
Nutrients meet organic processes
Photosynthesis occurs.
Sugars are created and flow down the phloem.
The tree grows.
The other is about the trunk as representing our foundational values.
Using mental energy, we determine what we think by extracting it from cultural and religious assumptions.
We FEEL and SENSE (the dissolution in the unconscious) those thoughts.
We come up with ideas, separating out the best ones.
We conjoin those ideas with action in the world.
Fermentation is what happens when we do that.
We can then distill what has the best results.
As this point, coagulation is a fuller understanding of what values function well.
But here's another thought. Check out this tree with multiple trunks.
I should have photographed higher up. There are four or five.
What this suggests is that the good can be plural. There may be no one way - even in an individual life. Unless - the tree having been pollarded at a young age - we see this as malformation? Like split personalities? Or maybe there's how we function as a family member, as an employee, as an artist, as a volunteer? I don't know.
Incidentally, after this I went to hug my poplar. Don't give up, we said to each other.
I like the video where you started at the bottom and looked upwards. Interesting to read the processes & values. And the multiple trunks - that's a good analogy :-)